Two Chinese artists show contrast in styles in side-by-side solo exhibitions of paintings at Hong Kong’s Blindspot Gallery
- Zhang Wenzhi mixes Chinese landscapes with Western still-life realism, painting native animals against backgrounds depicting northeast China
- The other featured artist, Zheng Haozhong, creates portraits of people in his studio, in loose sweeping brushstrokes that are full of colour
Having left Hong Kong at the beginning of 2019, curator Leo Chen Li is back for a show at Blindspot Gallery – side-by-side solo exhibitions of two mainland Chinese painters that are stylistic opposites but connected by an expression of fragmented identity.
Zhang was born in Dalian, a coastal city contested by a succession of colonial empires, from the Manchurians to the Russians and the Japanese, who fought to control this strategic seaport.
In his art, nature is the only constant, represented by the native animals the artist has seen embalmed in the local natural history museum, a witness to mankind’s warfare, ambition and destruction.
In Bay of the Deer (2023), a sika deer stands proudly in the foreground, its skin stripped to reveal raw, pink sinews that symbolise strength, trauma and, perhaps, an immutable spirit that goes beyond changes on the surface. Behind it is a painted tapestry that sees the interweaving of the archaic and the modern – the latter represented by the railway in many of Zhang’s works.
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Chen, a Shenzhen University graduate, hopes that Zhang’s interest in colonial history and the shifting of identities will resonate with the audience in Hong Kong, a city the curator knows well.
He started his curatorial career in the city, creating exhibitions and conducting research at Para Site, Asia Art Archive, City University of Hong Kong and Blindspot Gallery that tapped into Hong Kong’s focus on its postcolonial identity.
After four years, he left for Beijing, where he spent three years as head of research of the Magician Space gallery. The experience has made him sensitive to how different the process of modernisation is between the two places, and the way people care about very different things.
As an independent curator who has remained in Beijing, Chen’s mission is to bring visibility to Chinese artists of his generation who may struggle to be heard.
“How do we bring our issues to those who don’t want to know?” he says. “We don’t want to limit our activities to a small, local circle. Good art practice can cross borders and identity conflicts.”
The other artist in the show is Shanghai-based Zheng Haozhong. He creates portraits of himself, his friends and his beloved saxophone in the setting of his studio.
They are executed in spontaneous, loose brushstrokes that bring to mind the free jazz that he plays, Chen points out. This is a world that is very much contemporary and private, as opposed to one shaped by big historical events.
But, as with Zhang’s works, there is a strong sense of motion and change, expressed in the unfinished state of the figure and the paint drips in the corner of Patterns, Red, AG (2021), for example.
“When in discussion with the gallery, we asked ourselves, ‘What kind of painters do we need to bring here?’,” Chen says. “There are a lot of shows with art from China that are market-driven, trendy, popular. This is an attempt to show something quite different.”
“Zhang Wenzhi: Tiger in Mountains, Deer at Ocean” and “Zheng Haozhong: Melodic Variations”, at Blindspot Gallery, 15/F, Po Chai Industrial Building, 28 Wong Chuk Hang Road, Wong Chuk Hang, until January 13.
